More background about the Cisco case

This morning the FSF filed a lawsuit against Cisco, alleging that the
company has infringed our copyrights by distributing programs under
the GNU GPL and LGPL without respecting the licenses' terms. You've
probably seen the press release; if you're especially curious, you
might also want to read the complaint. Since we expect a lot of
people to be interested in this case, I wanted to take a little time
to explain what has happened, and why we're doing this, in plain
language.

Back in 2003, we learned that the Linksys WRT54G, a popular wireless
router, used a GNU/Linux system in its firmware, but customers weren't
receiving all the source code they were entitled to under our licenses.
You might remember that case—a lot of developers were interested
in it and it was discussed in several different forums.

As we always do in violation cases, we began a process of working with
Cisco to help them understand their obligations under our licenses,
and how they could come into compliance. Early on it seemed likely
that we could resolve the issues without any fuss.

While we were working on that case, though, new reports came in.
Other Cisco products were not in full compliance either. We started
talking to the company about those as well—and that's how a five-years-running game of Whack-a-Mole began. New issues were regularly
discovered before we could finish addressing the old ones.

During this entire time, Cisco has never been in full compliance with
our licenses. At first glance, the situation might look good. It's
not difficult to find "source code" on the Linksys site. But you only
have to dig a little deeper to find the problems. Those source code
downloads are often incomplete or out-of-date. Cisco also provides
written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going
unfulfilled.

Despite our best efforts, Cisco seems unwilling to take the steps that
are necessary to come into compliance and stay in compliance. We
asked them to notify customers about previous violations and inform
them about how they can now obtain complete source code; they have
refused to do this, along with the other reasonable demands we have
made to consider this case settled. The FSF has put in too many hours
helping the company fix the numerous mistakes it's made over the
years. Cisco needs to take responsibility for its own license
compliance.

We've decided that the best way to resolve this situation is to file
suit. It's not a decision we take lightly. A lawsuit takes resources
that we would rather spend elsewhere. But first and foremost, our
mission is to make sure that computer users everywhere have the right
to share and change the software that they use. Cisco has been
denying its customers the rights guaranteed to them by the GPL and the
LGPL, and we must put an end to that.